You want your business to grow. There are many assets that you can invest in to spur business growth. When you think of how to grow your business, better marketing and complex power moves within your industry come to mind. However, one of the most powerful tools that you should be using right now is actually relatively simple. You need an electronic document management system. Let's explore how this small move can take your business' growth to the next level.
To better understand how an electronic document management system can support business growth, we need to delve into what "business growth" truly means. Growth for a business is not the purchase of more assets or increasing the number of employees (this is expansion). While activities like these support business growth, actually growing your business only boils down to one thing: increasing profitability. Electronic document management will help you increase the profitability in the following ways:
Fewer document errors
A single typographical error can throw off an entire budget, cause confusion or even damage a business relationship. Unfortunately, humanity's proneness to mistakes makes the occasional document error inevitable. You can acquire an electronic document management system that automatically corrects errors based on contextual data. It can also prevent the possibilities of errors all together by automatically entering information for you.
This also helps with sorting and dissemination. For example, if a document is only meant for certain eyes, a digital document management system can restrict access for authorized personnel only.
Less redundancy
Redundant tasks mean that you are doing something at least twice. These duplicate efforts are frustrating wastes of time that make everyone's job harder. Not only does redundancy create (at least) double the effort to do something, but the documents themselves become confusing when you have to access them. An electronic document management system can cut back on redundancy by automatically entering information and alerting you when a document has already been created.
More efficient operation
About 40% of a typical worker's time is spent on non-productive tasks, many of which are simply categorized as "interruptions." This means that if you're paying someone $100,000 per year, that's $40,000 wasted each year. Having to sift through piles of paperwork is a key contributor to your workers' daily interruptions. With an electronic document management system, data can be accessed with a few clicks, saving countless hours – and dollars – each year.
Money saved on paper documents
A single sheet of paper only costs a few pennies, so it can be difficult to view paper as a major expense initially. However, most offices use enough paper to make paper extremely costly. To put this into perspective, a single office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper per year. This use becomes even more extreme in certain industries. For example, as evidenced by Yale University, a medium to large sized organization can save six figures each year by simply integrating time sheets into their electronic document management system.
Better customer service
An electronic document management system provides your entire team with instantaneous access to the information they need to deliver the best customer service experience possible. For example, if a customer has bought from you in the past, a sales representative can use an electronic document management system to instantly pull up all of the relevant information for that customer; this allows your representative to save the customer's time by connecting them with the products and services they need more quickly.
Grow your business by investing in it right now
An investment in an electronic document management system is an investment in the future of your business.